Frank Renfordt

I like your funny word play, however I’m not sure if I got everything. ‘Scuffle a/her rug’  - is it just nonsense or is it ambiguous?

Kyle Mercer

Hi, Frank. I was wondering if I was going to get any questions about that. I suspect you’re not the only one who might be puzzled by the expression.

‘Scuffling the rug’ is intended to be an invented—and somewhat antiquated—euphemism for sex. There’s an entire genre of old blues songs—highlighted by the work of Bo Carter—that revolved around that kind of thing.

Now you don’t hear Americans use the word ‘scuffle’ much anymore and when you do, it’s usually referring to some sort of fight.

But when I was growing up in East Texas, it was often treated as a synonym for ‘messing something up.’ Say I wiped my feet on the entrance rug and left it disheveled, my mother or grandmother would yell at me for having ‘scuffled the rug.’

And ‘rug’ and ‘carpet’ are old euphemisms for female pubic hair. For example, if a brunette woman dyed her hair blonde, it was said that the ‘drapes didn’t match the rug.’ Also antiquated, given contemporary grooming practices here in America.

But it was an old fashioned sort of song and so I thought it called for an old fashioned sort of vocabulary. (And given the minimal amount of text we get to work with in a song, it seems to me that vocabulary choices are one of the most powerful tools we have to help us define our song narrators quickly and efficiently.)

Of course, the downside of using obscure references is that nobody knows what the hell you’re talking about…

Frank Renfordt

Hi Kyle, I thought as much, but never heard the expression before. Thank you for your detailed explanation. I admire your knowledge of these old style music and lyrics, you are really a specialist. Do you write books about that stuff? If not - you should consider that.
I’m far from a native speaker’s level and have to keep my lyrics simple. But language is something I’m into.

Kyle Mercer

Gee, Frank, I’m not sure you should encourage my detailed explanations—my comments here at Frettie already seem to take up too many column-inches as it is.

Funny thing, in real life I’m a quiet guy who almost never has anything to say. (Of course, in real life, people just mostly talk about the weather or the game last night or what they had for lunch. Talking about music is much more interesting.)

And I would imagine a person would have to be VERY into language to learn to handle English as well as you do. I don’t think most Americans understand what a difficult language ours is to learn—a huge lexicon, highly irregular spellings and pronunciations, a host of idiomatic expressions and a flexibility that allows us to change a verb into a noun or a noun into a verb simply by juggling a word’s position in a sentence.

I don’t know about German, but the Romantic-based European languages I’ve studied, like Italian and Spanish, don’t provide those sort of trials and tribulations.

And so I figure you must be some sort of linguistic genius to write lyrics in this tongue. I remember trying to translate little bits of theater or short stories back in the days when I was studying languages and that was hard enough—but to try to do that while maintaining a rhyme scheme? Wow…